Results generated unique information about who suffers from migraines and what, how, where and when they use social media to describe their pain.

Among other things, they examined the most common descriptors for migraines, including profanities, tweet times and locations, and impact on productivity and mood.

Only 65 percent of the migraine tweets were from actual sufferers of migraines posting in real-time, researchers said.

Other tweets were advertising, general discussion, retweets, etc, indicating that not everything in social media is meaningful to the patient, DaSilva said. Migraines pose a huge public health problem, harming mood, productivity and overall quality of life.

An estimated 12 percent of the Western world population suffer migraine attacks, and of those, 75 percent see reduced functionality and 30 percent require bed rest, researchers said.